So Five Minutes Ago

I’ve decided that I need to take a break from vampire serieses. I’ve been reading through so many of them my brain can’t really process it anymore. First I’ll finish out the series that I’m on. And there are a couple of due-to-be-published titles coming out this year I’ll read. But then that’s it.

Since I’ve read so many of these damn things I’ve inevitably started comparing them all. I think everyone in the world knows about my disdain for Twilight, despite my initial love and addiction. I found that the Sookie Stackhouse series, while enjoyable, wasn’t as good as the television series based upon it. By the end I was reading them more to expand my understanding of True Blood than anything. Anita Blake I initially started reading after stumbling across this webcomic. That sounded too hilarious and titillating to pass up! I haven’t quite finished that series yet but so far it’s the one I like best. Even with all the sex. Or not just because of all the sex?

If these serieses were schools, then Twilight is Junior High, Sookie is High School, and Anita is College.

Anita Blake’s an urban fantasy series. It’s set in St. Louis. Unlike the True Blood-verse, where vamps have just made themselves known, in this universe vamps (and shifters and witches and whatnot) have always been known. Vampires recently were made legal in the US and there’s a big Church of Eternal Life as well as all kinds of strips clubs and other businesses. Anita is a licensed vampire executioner and works with the police department and FBI on all sorts of freaky supernatural monster crime. She’s totally badass. She’s also a zombie animator, a natural talent she’s had since she was little. She works at a business specifically to raise zombies, so lawyers can double check wills or loved ones can say good bye or whatever else may be required.

Awesomely, nearly every title in the series is also the name of a place of business that Anita visits during the course of that book’s case, which makes it a nice shorthand to remember what exactly happened. I can never remember which book is which out of the Sookie Stackhouse titles. This series has a bad rap but I think that’s a little bit unfair. Anita’s powers develop very naturally as a result of the events of each book, her interactions with the bad guys or supes, and are fully explained within the confines of the world that has been built. It just plain makes sense. And besides the preternatural stuff, there’s just so much heart-pounding action!

But nevermind the guns and the gore and the terror. Nearly everyone focuses on the sex so I thought I’d make a little guide. Books 1 through 5, Guilty Pleasures through Bloody Bones, are nearly completely chaste. Book 6, The Killing Dance, has one single sex scene. Book 7, Burnt Offerings, is back to being sex-free. Though Anita is no longer celibate, we just don’t read it on the page. Book 8, Blue Moon, again has one single sex scene. Book 9, Obsidian Butterfly? That’s right, nada. So far, no reason to get bent out of shape. And that’s over half of the currently published titles! Books 10 and 11, Narcissus in Chains and Cerulean Sins, both have a handful of sex scenes. Maybe 3 or 4 each. But again, nothing that I found excessive and certainly nothing outside of the norm established for the characters involved. Then we have book 12, Incubus Dreams. Hooboy. I completely lost track. This one definitely fits the “all sex and no plot” profile. It was kind of a mess. But then along comes book 13, Micah, and it dials everything back down. There’s only one single sex scene and more than that, it’s a return to the “simpler” bad guys of the earlier books, instead of a demi-god or a lunatic shapeshifter. Books 14 and 15, Danse Macabre and The Harlequin, seem to have found their way back to the handful of scenes level, though the former also included group sex instead of just one-on-one. And that’s as far as I’ve read.

I think the reason the dirty stuff doesn’t bother me is that while it may be complicated to explain, the series is truly about Anita’s relationships with her men. There is a lot of introspection and self-analysis going on that fits with all the characters developing in a believable manner. I don’t know that I’d recommend them for everyone I know but I definitely think they’re better than those dismissing the series as smut and nothing else.